Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Our base funding level lets us finish Steno Hero with screen reader support and 12 playable songs, but our first stretch goal, which I'm REALLY excited about, lets us build an in-game song editor that will allow you to play Steno Hero using any game in your music library. Seriously, how amazing would that be?! And any money we get after that will go toward the development of other games in the Steno Arcade series, like the chord-hopping Stenogger, the single-stroke platformer Stenobolt, and the dictionary crunching Stenografius!

If you want to be a Steno Hero and help save the future of stenographic technology, contribute at the $35 level and get the T-shirt to prove it! Or if you want to kick in a little more, you could get your name included in the lyrics of a special Steno Hero song level that we'll be composing just for the game. There's even a level where you can get a little custom-built pixelated version of yourself getting funky in the Steno Hero crowd!

Go check out the campaign, and if you've got a bit of cash to kick in, that would be amazing. Also many thanks for signal boosting this as much as possible, both online and off! When complete, the game itself will be 100% free for anyone to play, but the more funding we get, the more games we can build.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

We've had printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) for the Stenosaurus for several months, but I've only recently been able to begin properly testing it. Here are the tests I've run so far:

Apply power. Nothing started smoking or even heating up. Success!

Program the Stenosaurus to monotonously blink its LEDs. This took a horrendously long time, not because the program was difficult to write or because something was broken, but because the development tool chain for actually compiling and then loading the code onto the Stenosaurus took a long time to get right. Nothing was particularly difficult, but I ended up going through four different laptops, at least as many operating systems for those laptops, and a few combinations of various compilers, linkers, debuggers, and programmers. I'm happy to report that I now have a setup that works and is reasonably easy to replicate so that others can also start developing on Stenosaurus. (Of course, there is only one assembled PCB in existence, but that will hopefully change soon.) What's more, the LEDs blink as expected. Success!

Program the Stenosaurus to blink the LEDs anytime a key is pressed. This was relatively straightforward and worked as expected for all keys. Success!

In short, everything is going well, though there's a lot more testing yet to do.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

It had been falling into desuetude, so I recently gave the Known Supported Keyboards page on the Wiki a bit of an update. I took off keyboards that were no longer available, put on some new ones like the Keyboardio and the Ergodox, and rearranged them in order of current price. The whole Wiki really needs some work, honestly; it's been quite a while since its last thorough revision. But this is probably the most important page currently on it, so I'm glad that at least it's up to date again, especially since we're on the brink of launching the Steno Arcade crowfunding campaign! If anyone wants to add additional user-tested keyboards or comments (or, indeed, feels like revising other pages on the Wiki), the help would be very much appreciated!

Saturday, March 5, 2016

The incomparable Ted, the redoubtable Benoit, and many other people have been working tremendously hard to create the first new version of Plover for over two years, and they've finally come out with a pre-release candidate for testing!!!

With this new "weekly" build of Plover, we hope to start a trend of rapid releases. We'll try to push a new weekly every time there's a new feature, so you might see weekly builds on a daily or biweekly basis, depending on how much actual development gets done. One thing is for sure, though: We won't wait another 2 years (!!!) before getting improvements into your hands.
This is a "pre-release", not quite a version 3.0.0 just yet. We want to have the brave among you try it out and let us know if anything broke in a major way.

Infinite thanks again to Ted, Benoit, and all our other amazing developers. I've been running a version of Plover with several of these features since last Fall, and it's been fantastic to have them, but I can't wait to get my hands on the newest version.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

The most exciting thing here is that a third of respondents have already exceeded their regular typing speed, and it took at least half of them less than six months! Those are some pretty great stats, I have to say.
Selected comments from respondents:

Qwerty typing was hurting my hands and it was too slow. I Googled ways to increase my speed, found out about stenography and court reporting, then found out about the Open Steno project.

One day I decided that there had to be a better system for typing. I then wanted to learn how a steno machine works and that led me to you. Thank you, by the way, for your generosity and incredible guidance.

After investigating colemak I discovered that it would not boost my speed or to any great extent save my hands from RSI. I chose steno because of my loathing of QWERTY and colemak's inability to provide higher speeds or truly improved ergonomics.

I want to see if steno helps my dyslexia.

Video games led to mechanical keyboards led to typing led to steno.

Practice material in the form a la Duo Lingo (start with whole sentences from the start) would be great.

The Discourse chat system has been wonderful. I feel a lot more connected to the few brave souls trying to learn steno than before. :)

I wish plover would use a more rapid release schedule; having only a few small features in each new release rather than waiting years for a big one seems to work well for other FOSS projects who are adopting the strategy.

That last user will be very happy to learn that we're on the brink of a major new release, and that our release schedule will be far more rapid after that point. But more on that as it develops! Also stay tuned for exciting new Steno Arcade and Stenosaurus news, coming in the next few weeks!
Thanks, everyone, for answering the survey! It was really cool to see all your responses. Read the complete summary of responses here.